By Angus Mitchell ‘Where does Irish history begin?’ was the title of an essay published by Eoin MacNeill in 1904. This was an easy question to ask but harder to answer, and one that he spent much of his academic career elucidating. One acknowledged beginning might be traced through the temporal and spatial dreamtime of … Read more
By Daniel Mulhall In the opening episode of Ulysses at the Martello tower in Sandycove, we tap into Stephen Dedalus’s exchange with the Hibernophile Englishman Haines, in which Stephen describes himself as a subject of two masters, ‘the imperial British state’ and ‘the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church’. And, he adds sourly, ‘a third … Read more
By Brian Hopkins By the 1860s, Ireland was emerging from the devastation of the Great Hunger into an era of relative agricultural prosperity for some that coincided with a revival of Anglo-Irish landlordism. Support for or against landlords became increasingly more pronounced in elections to two-member seats during this decade. Tenant farmers were generally not … Read more
By Fiona Fitzsimons In the 1500s some ‘Murrano’ Jewish families, expelled from Spain by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, chose to settle in port towns along the Irish coast. The Murranos that settled in Ireland were merchant mariners, with capital and international contacts. In the early modern period they seem to have accepted diplomatic … Read more
By Peter Gray The collapse of Protestant radicalism in Ulster in the wake of the 1798 Rebellion has attracted much historical discussion. From being an epicentre of United Irish activity in the 1790s, Belfast and its rural hinterland appeared to have abandoned such enthusiasms and reoriented themselves to a conservative unionism over the following century. … Read more